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The Disciplined Disciple Compiler (DDC)

Disciple is a dialect of Haskell that uses strict evaluation as the default and supports destructive update of arbitrary data structures. Disciple includes region, effect and closure typing, and this extra information provides a handle on the operational behaviour of code that isn't available in other languages. Programs can be written in either a pure/functional or effecful/imperative style, and one of our goals is to provide both styles coherently in the same language. The two styles can be mixed safely, for example: when using laziness the effect system guarantees that computations with visible side effects are not suspended. Many Haskell programs are also Disciple programs, or will run with minor changes. Our target applications are the ones that you always find yourself writing C programs for, because existing functional languages are too slow, use too much memory, or don't let you update the data that you need to.

DDC is still in the "research prototype" stage, meaning that it will compile programs if you are nice to it, but expect compiler panics and missing features. You'll get panics due to ungraceful handling of errors in the source code, but valid programs should compile ok. Here are some working examples, along with their Disciple source code:

State of Play

This section records what the DDC developers are actively working on. If you're hacking on something DDC related then by all means add yourself here. Records are dropped off if they're older than about a month.

Ben Lippmeier (benl23) -- updated 23rd October 2010

I'm currently fixing support for type signatures. Previously we were just using the value portion of the sig, but we need to check effect and closure information as well.

Erik de Castro Lopo (m3ga) -- updated 18th Aug 2010

Started work on an LLVM backend. The idea is to have a -via-llvm command line option which would then generate object files using LLVM. The LLVM generated object files will be compatible with the object files generated using the C backend for easier debugging. Another goal for the backend is to make it easier to bootstrap the compiler (compile DDC with DDC) and to port the compiler to new platforms and architectures.

I'm pretty much stalled on all the current bugs and waiting for Ben to finish the refactoring at which time I'll have another crack at them.